The Price of Light | drarry

three | the bastard's dead

April 2002

Three and a half measly weeks after Lucius Malfoy's capture, Harry comes into work to find the whole place in disarray.

"The bastard died in the night," Trevor Rosen glares by way of greeting, and Harry knows instantly who the bastard is. For fuck's sake.

Rosen's fists clench at his sides. He groans and hurls a report off his desk in anger. "Why does this always happen? None of the Death Eaters can fucking hack it."

Harry bites back an "I warned you", and instead runs a frustrated hand through his hair. "Questioning had barely started," he sighs, "What's his cause of death?"

"If I knew, I'd tell you," his boss assures him. "All we know is his body was on the floor when we came down for interview this morning. No one has any idea what happened. Only very senior governmental figures were allowed access to his cell since yesterday evening..."

In that case I could give you more than one or two ideas of what happened, Harry thinks grimly, but again he bites it back. To keep his hands busy, he turns to help himself to a coffee from the station behind him. His cup fills with a slow wave of his wand.

"In a way, it's a good sign to Malfoy's followers, isn't it?" he says thoughtfully, without turning round. "Always dramatic when the symbol of the resistance dies."

"I suppose," Rosen agrees. "Still maddening, though. We had hardly any information from him. These Malfoys are bloody hard to crack, apparently."

"Malfoys, plural?" Harry's ears prick up. "Did you find Narcissa and Draco too?"

"Don't be obtuse, Harry," Rosen says with a shake of his head. "That would be serious news."

***

For the rest of the day, Harry can't get his mind off not Lucius, but Draco Malfoy.

It's crazy, he knows, but he can't help but picture Draco in light of the news of his father's death - by now, the papers will have hold of the story and maybe he's heard. How would that feel, he wonders?

Harry was never under the illusion that Draco and his father were particularly close, despite the united image that the family always used to present.

But now, the patriarch is dead, and dead with him, presumably, is a lot of his philosophy.

He can't picture Malfoy as he'd be now, a grown man. In Harry's mind, Draco is forever seventeen. Scared, shaking, a flash of blonde on the wrong side of the war. The world's youngest Death Eater.

But now he's twenty-two. He's had a whole life since school and the war - maybe he's got married in secret somewhere, has his first baby on the way. Or maybe he's dead too.

If he's alive, he won't be the youngest Death Eater any more, Harry realises. There have been a scary number of fresh Durmstrang graduates reportedly following the New Wave, as it's been called, and some Hogwarts kids too. Maybe Draco Malfoy's their idol. That's terrifying.

But Harry shouldn't really feel sorry for Draco, he knows that. Seventeen is old enough to know better, and besides, didn't he get the Dark Mark at sixteen? Who the fuck does that?

Harry wonders suddenly if Draco will cry, when he finds out about his father. He's only seen the well-bred Malfoy façade crack once, in the bathrooms in Sixth Year before Harry cast Sectumsempera on him. An awful day.

But before that day, Malfoy was renowned throughout the school for his emotionlessly British stiff upper lip attitude; even in First Year, the boy was unbreakable. Harry's seen him get into all kinds of nasty Quidditch accidents, yet in Harry's memory, the cold Malfoy expression barely wavers, and certainly never allows tears to fall.

You're meant to cry if your dad dies, though, Harry thinks. Surely he'll cry.

***

Ron's made a pasta bake for dinner. A little clumsy but homely, uncomplicated, and warming, it somehow encapsulates everything that he is.

"Good day?" Hermione asks the two
of them lightly as Ron fills the bowls, and Ron shoots Harry a warning look across the table.

Don't mention Malfoy, Harry reads in the blue-eyed glare. So, fine, he won't.

"It was alright, thanks," he replies instead. "A bit boring."

He hates lying to Hermione, but she looks content with his answer at least. Harry knows she's fragile but thinks Ron babies her a little much. She could take a little more, surely.

"How was your day, sweetness?" Ron asks, and again Harry's struck by how much his tone softens when he talks to her. God, his friends are so in love.

"It was nice," Hermione smiles. "I did some reading... managed to nip to the library for a bit, actually. And Luna popped in this afternoon for some tea, which was lovely. And I heard from Ginny..."

Harry lets his mind drift to the stress of the day. Ron won't let him talk about his problems, but he can't stop him thinking about it.

There'll be a whole inquiry into Malfoy's death, that should be a mess, he thinks. But it won't be, he knows that.

It'll be a clean-ruled suicide again - "But suicide by what means?!" he wants to scream. In an empty, wandless cell guarded all hours of the day and night by Dementors, legitimately there's no way such a thing could've happened. And people who take it upon themselves to serve justice on Death Eaters aren't much more morally superior than the terrorists themselves.

"Pass the salt, Harry?" Ron interrupts Harry's daze, and Harry leaps to action more enthusiastically than necessary, as if to prove he'd been listening the whole time.

"Salt, yeah, absolutely," he nods. Ron and Hermione exchange a glance.

None of them know, sitting there, that Harry won't come back for dinner the following night. Or the night after that, or the night after that. His outing tomorrow will take him further than any of them would ever imagine.

So, blissfully ignorant of this knowledge, the three of them just sit at the kitchen table like it's any other night. And they talk about the library, and their friends, and the fucking weather.

Like they don't know who Draco Malfoy is, or about the Death Eater uprising, or about the cold of the outside world that threatens to freeze them all from the inside out.

Because they don't know about that. Not yet.

***

The next morning when he leaves the house, something makes Harry slip his Invisibility Cloak into his bag. It's early and his mind is already heading for the woods around the space the Malfoy Manor used to hold. He whistles to himself as he locks the door behind him, and strolls happily down the path.

It's a beautifully dark April morning.

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~ paradisedraco